102 SIDNEY H. RAY. 
There is a considerable amount of variation in the languages of 
‘the New Hebrides, and this corresponds to differences which 
have been noted in the physical characteristics of the islanders. 
All accounts, though these are very few, agree in describing the 
natives of the southern islands of the group as darker in colour 
and inferior in culture to those of the north. An examination of 
the languages shows that the inhabitants must be regarded as 
sprung from not one, but several sources. The languages of 
Tanna and Eromanga, though agreeing in some instances with 
those of the Central and Northern districts, contain much that is 
different. This is especially seen in the long and complicated 
verbal forms they have, and in various points of grammatical 
detail. In the nouns, for example, we are told that the removal 
of what in the northern tongues would be a separable particle, 
will destroy the meaning of the word. In Tanna, nig7 is ‘tree,’ 
and nigum is ‘fire.’ In Efate, these words appear as nekaw and 
nakabu ; in Malekula, nice, nokambu. But na, ne, no are separ- 
able, being forms of the article, leaving kau, ce (the Fiji kau, 
Araga cai), and kabu, kambu as the roots. But in Tannese, ‘‘if the 
m be taken away, there would be no longer any sense in these 
words, gi and gum.”* Other points of divergence in the details 
of grammar and vocabulary render the languages of Aneityum, 
Tanna, and Eromanga distinct from those further north, while 
they are equally distinct from the languages of the Loyalty Islands 
and New Caledonia. Whether the southern languages of the New 
Hebrides represent an archaic form of the primitive Melanesian 
speech, or show traces of admixture with some other linguistic 
stock, is a subject well worthy of investigation, but it is beyond 
the scope of the present paper, which deals with facts rather than 
with speculations. 
The languages of the Central portion of the group—those of 
Efate and the neighbouring islands—are much simpler in struc- 
ture than those found north and south of them. Their vocabu- — 
laries contain a large number of Polynesian words, and in their 
* Rev. W. Gray, in Macdonald’s “ South Sea Languages,” p. 134. 
